Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Eric Verlo

AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

Cost to attend NYC climate march: $$. Landing an anti-capitalism message in a capitalist magazine: priceless.

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Eric Verlo

NEW YORK, NEW YORK- A lot of people took our picture at Sunday’s People’s Climate March, our anti-capitalist banner expressed a popular undercurrent to the greener NGO themes, although many handmade posters singled out Capitalism as the root of climate change. As the 400,000 STRONG march dispersed on 11th Avenue, Vogue Magazine photographer Peter van Agtmael captured this approximate moment for a spread on Vogue.com. Occupiers tire of the admonition “wear a suit” but it proved fruitful this weekend: my suit was interviewed by MSNBC (twice), Washington Post, Irish Times, Salon, Slate, and more, with great photos on USA Today, Vice, and CNN.

Letter to Michael Moore, indelible hero, retrograde Occupy Obama supporter

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Dear Michael,
I write you as a longtime, enthusiastic fan, and please pardon me if the deference and affection I’d like to convey have been overcome by my shock at your recent emails. My question may sound rhetorical, but I would really like to know: what the hell compels you to shill once again for Barack Obama? Beside the campaign pablum.

When you visited Occupys across the country, including ours in Denver, I defended you to friends who dismissed you as the usual shepherd’s crook for the Democratic Party. No no no I assured them, he gets it. But did you? We weren’t protesting eight years of Bush followed by an ineffectual Obama, we were protesting Obama and the economic system under his watch. We weren’t protesting the Democratic Party being insufficiently adversarial to the Republicans, we were protesting the corporate party system, the Democrat face being the more two-faced.

Most significantly, while our anger was vented at Wall Street, the repression we were dealt, and which dissenters continue to suffer, came directly from the agencies of President Obama.

Yet now you presume to accuse the same audience of cynicism about the election, and urge us to support Democrat Obama, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, out of fear of the Big Bad Wolf, as usual Republican.

Maybe as the election draws to a climax you’ve become privy to an unseen power struggle you need to tell us about. Because it’s at odds with your earlier giddiness with Occupy. Then your enthusiasm was unclouded by your pragmatism today.

Please do tell, because Mitt Romney seems more a sheep in wolf’s clothing to me. He’s a cartoonish straw man villain spouting wedge-issue threats to scare us crows from lighting upon the real corporate agenda. The banking kleptocracy doesn’t care about gay/women’s rights except to restrict all rights, the easier to pursue its grand thefts. If the GOP had wanted to pick a winner, I’m certain the average doctor or teacher you come across everyday would have made a more suited contender.

Could the GOP have chosen a greedier more callous thug, who didn’t pay his taxes, tainted by so much scandal that a new one emerged every day to titillate and offend? Obama had to sluff the first presidential debate because they’d chosen such an unbelievable, lame duck opponent that the ratings threatened to tank.

When the Neocon Washington Post endorsed President Obama, I knew the stooge from the ringer. The empire would be screwed without Obama to placate its victims. As Glen Ford argues, Obama may appear the lesser evil, but he’s the more effective evil. He’ll sell what arrogantly-white Romney never could: more war, austerity, privatization, fossil fuel. Without Obama, the global populace would push back.

I don’t favor a Romney win, but for another reason than you. A Romney presidency would mean another cycle of voter outrage, with MoveOn once again rallying Democrats, as if they were any different, and you probably among them.

But the election is not even going to be close. The six billion spent on this election was six billion earned by the media by pretending the polling was tied, to extort more spending by both sides. Meanwhile horseless statistician Nate Silver is vilified by television pundits because he’s calculated that surprise, Obama has a comfortable lead over his bogeyman idiot challenger.

Yes I know multitudes who support Mitt Romney. Four years ago they got nowhere with John McCain, because the juggernaut of empire was already up to full steam with Obama. I confess I didn’t know it then, and fretted a GOP win like everybody else, but it didn’t keep me from voting for Cynthia McKinney against war and climate change.

You began your letter by saying “I get it” but then assume we non-voters are motivated by apathy or weariness. You’re the one who sounds worn down. Bummer.

Yours,
Eric

Bill Graber, fake lesbian activist, agent provocateur, threatens websites to try to withdrawn his mug from public view

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Eric Verlo

HELP! Any other sites out there being threatened by Bill Graber, fake lesbian blogger, DADT spoiler and Syria false flag propaganda troll? Now he’s pretending copyright infringement, trying to withdraw his ugly mug from public view. He’s threatening to sue NMT, our host, and I guess …half the web. Oh. NEVER MIND.

What a hoser. If the “retired Air Force” dude hadn’t been unmasked as the fake lesbian blogger “Paula Brooks” giving cover to the more infamous Gay Girl of Damascus Amina Arraf dude, he’d still be infiltrating lesbian blogs, sabotaging their DADT efforts and demoralizing fellow contributors, like a typical COINTELPRO op! When outed by the Washington Post, this is the photo he supplied, now it’s all over the internet. In our initial story, we didn’t know how much weight to give either his name, or his photo, considering he was the source of both, uncorroborated. Judging by the comments and emails we’ve received from agent Lez-Dude, he doesn’t mind the name “Bill Graber” all over the place, but boy he seems uncomfortable with the picture being out there. Could it be that he’s worried that with enough exposure the image will eventually catch the eye of someone who knows his real identity? OR did he give a dead person’s picture to the WaPo, and that could be found out? Who knows, it’s not like “Graber” is above hiding behind another identity, when he blogged as a deaf lesbian whose “dad” had to handle her phone calls from those dagblast reporters.

I’d say his claim to have copyrighted his lonesome image is an invitation for someone from the locality of Fairborn, Ohio to snap a real pic. His phone is 937-305-5518, his IP is 65.185.154.156, my bet would be to show this mug shot around Asian massage parlors outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Much legwork has already been done on “Bill Graber” sick puppy who insinuates himself into lesbian conversations to speak abusively to women, but his spooky military MO is going overlooked.

Synthesizing the complaints accumulated about “Paula Brooks” yields a pattern unnervingly like an activist-provocateur. Graber claims he was motivated to pose as a lesbian to help the cause of DADT, yet his efforts were chiefly disruptive and harmful. Accounts by fellow bloggers mirror exactly what peace activists experience with undercover cops.

By the way, after his unmasking, Graber handed off his site to another non-lesbian, not a man this time, whose husband is in the military.

Call me a nut, but I’m inclined to suggest that when the WaPo tracked lesbian “Brooks” to a man, it turned out to be a professional infiltrator, and an agreement was reached with the pro-military WaPo where a reasonably believable profile would be tendered to the public, sooner than out an agent. Thus we have “Graber”, this photo, and the following details: retired Air Force, construction worker, 58 years old, from Ohio. That’s all.

Whose photo? Well the longer that mug is online, the more likely such a question will be answered.

Then there will be more embarrassment, considering Graber-dude’s activities weren’t simply to thwart gay rights activists, but to lay the groundwork for US intervention in Syria, and who knows what else.

Of course that’s all conjecture, because I don’t want to out a Federal agent, that would be illegal.

Infiltrating social justice groups is illegal too, so in the interest of solidarity in activism, let’s find out who this Graber-dude is and invite him to come out, so to speak.

Chalk up this further DADT irony: when the military enforces DADT, it can’t hire any real lesbians to infiltrate lesbian blogs, it can only hire fake-lesbians. One hopes the Air Force wasn’t running gay and lesbian blogs to ferret out active duty homosexuals.

Alright, as promised, back to the charade of Graber-dude, ornery construction worker, upset about his likeness being featured on NMT. Here’s what he just sent us, writing as sammy the surf dog, in reply to our telling him to get stuffed:

You obviously need to get up to speed on just what the copyright laws says….

You are to remove that picture at once…. I will be sending the required notices to You… your hosting company and Google

and I’d start thinking about where you going to get the money to pay for the 2 month of unauthorized use….

—
Bill Graber

937-305-5518

Seriously? Google, of all people, will see you coming. Unmasked miscreant wants to erase his tracks online. Good luck with that. Your mug is practically an icon, you could trademark it, except now it’s become generic for fake lesbian dude. Yeah, whatever your expertise, it ain’t copyright.

Graber-Dude, what I’m doing, actually, is contacting others online to see how many are receiving your silly threats. I see one site has switched out your photo with a sketch, but hopefully expressing solidarity the rest of us will just share a laugh.

Obviously we don’t NEED to keep your picture here, it’s everywhere else, let other sites do the heavy lifting, but now that you’re erase-my-tracks-dude, you’ve piqued our interest. Because infiltrators are of special interest to us. Unmasked, they ought to be reassigned to desk jobs with their tail between their legs, not busy at their keyboards exercising their mucking-up skills.

Here’s Graber-Dude’s next composition:

Dear Eric Verlo

It has come to my attention that you have made an unauthorized use of my copyrighted image in the preparation of the article entitled “Straight blogger confesses he’s lesbian.”

I have reserved all rights to this image, and I have registered the copyright.

You neither asked for nor received permission to use the image nor to make or distribute copies of said image. Therefore, I believe you have willfully infringed my rights under 17 USC Section 101, et seq. and could be liable for statutory damages as high as $100,000.

I demand that you immediately cease the use and distribution of all infringing works derived from this image, and all copies of it, and that you deliver to me all unused, undistributed copies of it, or destroy such copies immediately, and that you desist from this or any other infringement of my rights in the future.

You will also need to contact me to discuss the licensing fees incurred by your unauthorized use of this image.

If I have not received an affirmative response from you by 8-19-11 indicating that you have fully complied with these requirements, I shall consider taking the full legal remedies available to rectify this situation.

Sincerely,

Mr. Graber-Dude. How about we trade images? You can use mine, you have my permission. But you don’t need it. Unless you’re using my likeness for commercial purpose, anyone is allowed to identify me with my image. Go ahead, I’ve got images all over, you have plenty from which to choose. You on the other hand have only one. Something odd about that.

With Daniel Pearl Act, US warns others to respect press freedoms, of WSJ only

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Eric Verlo

President Obama signed off on the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act, surrounded by friends and colleagues of the former WSJ reporter who was slain in pursuit of al-Qaeda, while infiltrating Pakistan as if working for one of America’s loudest War-on-Islam propaganda drummers wasn’t pushing it. Taking the theme of don’t-kill-journalists at face value however, are there provisions in the act to exclude the US and its allies?

Because our forces have intimidated or outright killed I think what amounts to the high score of journalists in our war zones. If we’re concerned exclusively with reporters who’ve been decapitated, I’m sure those victims of our high caliber overkill outnumber Daniel Pearl too.

No, I suppose we’re only talking about protecting our journalists, the embeds, the only ones of which we approve. What have embeds proven to be but the new Army Press Corps? This is the same indemnity we claim for our soldiers. Try to shoot one of those and we obliterate entire clans based on rumors of who did it. If we capture someone alive, we put them on trial for combating us illegally. We dismiss laws of war that spell out that belligerents may only shoot at opponents shooting back. If they’re unarmed, or surrendering, or leaving the battle unarmed, or eating dinner with their family, they are not fair game. But we do it, and when journalists try to document our crimes we kill them.

Daniel Pearl worked for the WSJ. It’s the leading Neocon pro-war mouthpiece, only just ahead of the NY Times and the Washington Post, among newspapers with authority. If Pearl’s tracking of al-Qaeda didn’t help US intelligence outright, his reports were certainly serving the war propaganda machine.

When the Jewish community highlights the plot line that Pearl was killed because he was a Jew, it unveils a purposeful vaguarity the Israeli lobby likes to pretend is a distinction between American Jews and Zionists. The argument has it that all Jews may or may not support Israel, and yet critics of Zionism are accused of being anti-Semitic. Because, I’ll assert, AIPAC, the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal are determined to behave as if they have everyone’s support. Was Daniel Pearl a Zionist, he worked for it, and aimed to assail its declared arch-enemy under the pretext of journalist objectivity.

You can’t make the same accusation of the independent journalists being silenced wherever our military is operating. In our own country America is even keeping its own photo-journalists from being able to document the oil spill in the gulf.

The Daniel Pearl Act mandates that reports of inhibitions to journalists, especially if they are suspected of being systemic, be investigated and condemned with all the ensuing world police bells and whistles. I think that language smacks of the mandate to label “genocide” only where the US sees it.

Darfur, for example. Or the Balkans. Examples with which few fellow nations agree. To justify our interviention. Never Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and of course I could go on.

This ACT is a political weapon of semantics to pretend right is on our side, Orwellian doublespeak to ordain preemptive drone attacks.

If President Obama had meant this legislation to address freedom of the press sincerely, he would have appended the names of all the journalists who we’ve killed, ourselves or by proxy. The list would have run into the footnotes, and it would have meant investigating ourselves. Not going to happen.

Healthcare reformist TR Reid visits COS to say universal coverage not possible

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS– [UPDATED]
My question to TR Reid, who speaks tonight at CC’s Palmer Hall, is how can voices for health care rights get past the corporate media editors?
As Washington Post Denver bureau chief and NPR reporter, Reid’s answer will reveal his earnestness, because most clearly his editors have kept the upper hand. The Independent, which is sponsoring tonight’s event, has invited two respondents to offer rebuttals, but both represent the health care status quo, there is no one advocating for socialized medicine, automatically framing Reid’s centrism as the people’s best hope.

I remember a TR Reid interview on NPR, which left me with the distinct impression of a hobbled argument. Look at the subtitle of his Frontline documentary: Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system? They don’t say “what can the US learn” but can it. That’s the same false question the corporate media use to approach Global Warming. Though the answer is a multiplicity of affirmatives, the headline posed as a question leaves the viewer with the impression the conclusion is his to decide. The moon: is it there?

A follow-up Sick Around America was famously, in alternative media circles at least, altered to endorse insurance mandates. Reid broke away from the final product when PBS refused to mention his conclusion that health insurance should not be for profit. Reid chalked it up to a disagreement, not specifically a motive.

The book Mr. Reid will be signing is titled The Healing of America: a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care. His own disjointed title reflects why he returned empty-handed. Can you imagine if it had read simply: a global quest for health care?

Better, cheaper and fairer are redundant qualifiers and load the theme with false perspective. “Better” assumes American care can be ranked on a scale, this book is obviously only for those getting care. “Cheaper” assumes health care must have a price — Universal health care is free. “Fairer” again assumes that our current equilibrium is in some measurable aspect fair, besides which, the concept is a fallacy. There’s unfair and fair. Moving from one toward the other, fairness is unfair until it is fair. Besides which, every schoolchild knows “fairer” is expressed as “more fair.” If Reid had been honest, he would have phrased it “less unfair.”

TR Reid applauds the health care available in other developed countries, but notes the other systems are not without their flaws. Is this some sort of psychological inducement to feed the American ego, that US reform can aim higher than the health care as a right provided elsewhere? I think it’s a loophole with which to scuttle his proposal.

It seems TR Reid is ignoring the chief obstacle to health care. It’s not reason, it’s not taxes. The chief obstacle is capitalist greed, it’s class warfare, and the social systems of our like nations are under attack as well. The shortcomings which TR Reid sees in Europe are the result of legislative meddling with systems enacted by the people.

Americans aren’t going to get health care by waiting on their legislators, or the benevolence of the corporations. The audience tonight may be impressed by TR Reid’s findings, but he’s offering nothing but placebo. Talking about health care, visualizing it, salivating at its proximity, is as much taste as TR Reid, the Washington Post and its corporate health industry advertisers will have us get.

UPDATE: TR Reid spoke to a standing room only crowd and received a standing ovation. As per usual for journalists, he provided his own disclaimer for venturing from objectivity when he posited that providing health care for all could be a moral obligation. But on the matter of The Politics of Health Care Reform, the topic of his speech, he had nothing to say.

Really, he threw the question back at the audience. Why won’t the USA provide universal coverage to its people. I’ve thought about it a lot, he told us, and I don’t have the answer.

When it came why some countries pay for Viagra, while others do not, TR Reid was humorously inquisitive. His rundown of the various medical systems throughout the world was decidedly comprehensive. But on the question of the hour, Reid was the customary incurious newspaperman which might explain his success in major media.

Not once, even at someone’s prompting, did Reid mention the for-profit worm in America’s medical system’s rotten apple. We’re told that Reid walked away from the second Frontline documentary for its whitewash of his criticism of the for-profit incentive which prevents payment systems from serving the public good. He’s excised the subject from his own presentation too. Instead, Reid focused on the millions of uninsured Americans, without a mention of the bigger population of victims, those insured who are denied care nonetheless.

Reid was pessimistic about the chances for near-term reform, based on anecdotal evidence of comments he’s received on the Frontline website. A year ago his documentary got mostly supportive comments. This year they are predominantly critical. Thus, Reid concludes, Americans do not want health care reform.

His audience tonight applauded every punchline about health care as a human right, yet Reid held that we did not want it badly enough. I hate it when the best of our spokesmen blame the audience.

William Blum – Anti-Empire Report

Posted on January 6, 2010 by NMT

Here’s William Blum’s latest essay, on Lincoln Gordon, Brazil, Cuba, and the 2009 Nobel Laureate, reprinted from www.killinghope.org.

THE ANTI-EMPIRE REPORT
By William Blum, January 6, 2009

The American elite

Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon’s diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".

You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.

Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington’s on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil’s military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth", which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)

In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated — in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles — that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)

Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."

Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:

MANN: I hope you’re as happy about Brazil as I am.

LBJ: I am.

MANN: I think that’s the most important thing that’s happened in the hemisphere in three years.

LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.¹

So the next time you’re faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even — oh, just choosing a position at random — the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" … "best and brightest" who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America’s past. In its present. In its future. They’re the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.

Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.

And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."

Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be Nobel Peace Prize winners

In November I wrote:

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Well, on December 10 the president clutched the prize in his blood-stained hands. But then the Nobel Laureate surprised us. On December 17 the United States fired cruise missiles at people in … not Iran, but Yemen, all "terrorists" of course, who were, needless to say, planning "an imminent attack against a U.S. asset".² A week later the United States carried out another attack against "senior al-Qaeda operatives" in Yemen.³

Reports are that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway is now in conference to determine whether to raise the maximum number of wars allowed to ten. Given the committee’s ignoble history, I imagine that Obama is taking part in the discussion. As is Henry Kissinger.

The targets of these attacks in Yemen reportedly include fighters coming from Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmation of the warnings long given — even by the CIA and the Pentagon — that those US interventions were creating new anti-American terrorists. (That’s anti-American foreign policy, not necessarily anything else American.) How long before the United States will be waging war in some other god-forsaken land against anti-American terrorists whose numbers include fighters from Yemen? Or Pakistan? Or Somalia? Or Palestine?

Our blessed country is currently involved in so many bloody imperial adventures around the world that one needs a scorecard to keep up. Rick Rozoff of StopNATO has provided this for us in some detail.⁴

For this entire century, almost all these anti-American terrorists have been typically referred to as "al-Qaeda", as if you have to be a member of something called al-Qaeda to resent bombs falling on your house or wedding party; as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American terrorism while being a member of al-Qaeda and people retaliating against American terrorism while NOT being a member of al-Qaeda. However, there is not necessarily even such an animal as a "member of al-Qaeda", albeit there now exists "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula". Anti-American terrorists do know how to choose a name that attracts attention in the world media, that appears formidable, that scares Americans. Governments have learned to label their insurgents "al-Qaeda" to start the military aid flowing from Washington, just like they yelled "communist" during the Cold War. And from the perspective of those conducting the War on Terror, the bigger and more threatening the enemy, the better — more funding, greater prestige, enhanced career advancement. Just like with the creation of something called The International Communist Conspiracy.

It’s not just the American bombings, invasions and occupations that spur the terrorists on, but the American torture. Here’s Bowe Robert Bergdahl, US soldier captured in Afghanistan, speaking on a video made by his Taliban captors: He said he had been well-treated, contrasting his fate to that of prisoners held in US military prisons, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "I bear witness I was continuously treated as a human being, with dignity, and I had nobody deprive me of my clothes and take pictures of me naked. I had no dogs barking at me or biting me as my country has done to their Muslim prisoners in the jails that I have mentioned."⁵

Of course the Taliban provided the script, but what was the script based on? What inspired them to use such words and images, to make such references?

Cuba. Again. Still. Forever.

More than 50 years now it is. The propaganda and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media seems endless and unwavering. They can not accept the fact that Cuban leaders are humane or rational. Here’s the Washington Post of December 13 writing about an American arrested in Cuba:

"The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was distributing cellphones and laptop computers to Cuban activists. … Under Cuban law … a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of ‘dangerousness’."

That sounds just awful, doesn’t it? Imagine being subject to arrest for whatever someone may choose to label "dangerousness". But the exact same thing has happened repeatedly in the United States since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We don’t use the word "dangerousness". We speak of "national security". Or, more recently, "terrorism". Or "providing material support to terrorism".

The arrested American works for Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), a US government contractor that provides services to the State Department, the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In 2008, DAI was funded by the US Congress to "promote transition to democracy" in Cuba. Yes, Oh Happy Day!, we’re bringing democracy to Cuba just as we’re bringing it to Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, DAI was contracted by USAID to work in Venezuela and proceeded to fund the same groups that a few months earlier had worked to stage a coup — temporarily successful — against President Hugo Chávez. DAI performed other subversive work in Venezuela and has also been active in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hotspots. "Subversive" is what Washington would label an organization like DAI if they behaved in the same way in the United States in behalf of a foreign government.⁶

The American mainstream media never makes its readers aware of the following (so I do so repeatedly): The United States is to the Cuban government like al-Qaeda is to the government in Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds or communication equipment from al-Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence usually gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s "political prisoners" are such dissidents.

The Washington Post story continued:

"The Cuban government granted ordinary citizens the right to buy cellphones just last year." Period.

What does one make of such a statement without further information? How could the Cuban government have been so insensitive to people’s needs for so many years? Well, that must be just the way a "totalitarian" state behaves. But the fact is that because of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, with a major loss to Cuba of its foreign trade, combined with the relentless US economic aggression, the Caribbean island was hit by a great energy shortage beginning in the 1990s, which caused repeated blackouts. Cuban authorities had no choice but to limit the sale of energy-hogging electrical devices such as cell phones; but once the country returned to energy sufficiency the restrictions were revoked.

"Cubans who want to log on [to the Internet] often have to give their names to the government."

What does that mean? Americans, thank God, can log onto the Internet without giving their names to the government. Their Internet Service Provider does it for them, furnishing their names to the government, along with their emails, when requested.

"Access to some Web sites is restricted."

Which ones? Why? More importantly, what information might a Cuban discover on the Internet that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami. International conferences on all manner of political, economic and social subjects are held regularly in Cuba. What does the American media think is the great secret being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

"Cuba has a nascent blogging community, led by the popular commentator Yoani Sánchez, who often writes about how she and her husband are followed and harassed by government agents because of her Web posts. Sánchez has repeatedly applied for permission to leave the country to accept journalism awards, so far unsuccessfully."

According to a well-documented account⁷, Sánchez’s tale of government abuse appears rather exaggerated. Moreover, she moved to Switzerland in 2002, lived there for two years, and then voluntarily returned to Cuba. On the other hand, in January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. However, the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration.

"’Counterrevolutionary activities’, which include mild protests and critical writings, carry the risk of censure or arrest. Anti-government graffiti and speech are considered serious crimes."

Raise your hand if you or someone you know of was ever arrested in the United States for taking part in a protest. And substitute "pro al-Qaeda" for "counterrevolutionary" and for "anti-government" and think of the thousands imprisoned the past eight years by the United States all over the world for … for what? In most cases there’s no clear answer. Or the answer is clear: (a) being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or (b) being turned in to collect a bounty offered by the United States, or (c) thought crimes. And whatever the reason for the imprisonment, they were likely tortured. Even the most fanatical anti-Castroites don’t accuse Cuba of that. In the period of the Cuban revolution, since 1959, Cuba has had one of the very best records on human rights in the hemisphere. See my essay: "The United States, Cuba and this thing called Democracy".⁸

There’s no case of anyone arrested in Cuba that compares in injustice and cruelty to the arrest in 1998 by the United States government of those who came to be known as the "Cuban Five", sentenced in Florida to exceedingly long prison terms for trying to stem terrorist acts against Cuba emanating from the US.⁹ It would be lovely if the Cuban government could trade their DAI prisoner for the five. Cuba, on several occasions, has proposed to Washington the exchange of a number of what the US regards as "political prisoners" in Cuba for the five Cubans held in the United States. So far the United States has not agreed to do so.

Notes

Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-1964 (New York, 1997), p.306. All other sources for this section on Gordon can be found in: Washington Post, December 22, 2009, obituary; The Guardian (London), August 31, 2007; William Blum, "Killing Hope", chapter 27 ^↩

ABC News, December 17, 2009; Washington Post, December 19, 2009 ^↩

Washington Post, December 25, 2009 ^↩

Stop NATO, "2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World", December 30, 2009. To get on the StopNATO mailing list write to r_rozoff@yahoo.com. To see back issues: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/^↩

Reuters, December 25, 2009 ^↩

For more details on DAI, see Eva Golinger, "The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela" (2006) and her website, posting for December 31, 2009 ^↩

Salim Lamrani, professor at Paris Descartes University, "The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez", Monthly Review magazine, November 12, 2009 ^↩

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/democ.htm ^↩

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/polpris.htm ^↩

Cuba declines OAS offer of Trojan Horse

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Over US objections, the Organization of American States (OAS, OEA) voted to invite Cuba back into the fold, from which it had been expelled in 1962 for hanging with Communists. Cuba’s reply? No thanks! Although Cuba’s acceptance by fellow nations was hailed a victory, Fidel Castro wrote: “It is naive to think that the good intentions of one president justifies the existence of a body that… supported… neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises.”

In an essay published the day before Cuba’s official repudiation of the offer to recommit to the OAS, Fidel Castro recalled a lesson from the siege of Troy. Castro was reported widely as having called the OAS a “U.S. Trojan horse.” In reality, Castro blamed the OAS for having “opened the gates” to the Trojan horse of US post-colonial despotism.

The Trojan horse

RAFAEL Correa, president of Ecuador, currently visiting Honduras, stated the day before the OAS meeting: “I believe that the OAS has lost its raison d’être, maybe it never had a raison d’être.” The news, circulated by ANSA, adds that Correa, “prophesized ‘the demise’ of that organization given the many errors it has committed.”

He affirmed “that the countries of the American continent, given their geographic conditions, cannot all be put ‘in the same basket.’ And for that reason Ecuador proposed some months back the creation of the Organization of Latin American States.

“’It is not possible for the region’s problems to be discussed in Washington; let us construct something of our own, without countries alien to our culture, our values, and obviously including countries that were inexplicably separated from the inter-American system, and I am referring to the concrete case of Cuba… that was a tremendous shame and demonstrates the double standards that exist in international relations.’” On his arrival in Honduras, both President Zelaya and Correa stated that “The OAS must be reformed and reincorporate Cuba; if not, it will have to disappear.”

Another cable from the DPA news agency affirms:

“Cuba’s reintegration in the Organization of American States (OAS) has moved from being an issue per se of the organization’s General Assembly in Honduran San Pedro Sula, to once again being turned into an excuse for a struggle of interests that goes much further than the limits of the Caribbean island and could (once again) call hemispheric relations into question.

“The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, made that very clear on describing the hemispheric meeting that begins this Tuesday in Honduras in quasi military terms.

“It will be,” he said, an ‘interesting battle’ in which if it is demonstrated that the OAS ‘continues being a ministry of the colonies’ that is not transformed in order ‘to subordinate itself to the will of the governments comprising it,’ it will be necessary to propose ‘leaving’ the organization and creating an alternative.”

“’Latin American countries are making Cuba the litmus test for the quality of the Obama administration’s approach to Latin America,” Julia E. Sweig, a Cuba scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Washington Post on the eve of the Honduran meeting.”

In resisting the aggressions of the most powerful empire ever to have existed, our people fought for the other sister peoples of this continent. The OAS was an accomplice of all the crimes committed against Cuba.

At one moment or another, the totality of the countries of Latin America were victims of interventions and political and economic aggression. There is not one single one that can deny that. It is naive to believe that the good intentions of a president of the United States can justify the existence of that institution that opened the gates to the Trojan horse that backed the Summits of the Americas, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises. Ignorance, underdevelopment, economic dependence, poverty, the forced return of those who emigrate in search of work, the brain drain, and even the sophisticated weapons of organized crime were the consequences of interventions and plundering proceeding from the North. Cuba, a little country, has demonstrated that it can resist the blockade and advance in many fields, and even cooperate with other countries.

Today’s speech by the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, at the OAS General Assembly, contains principles that could go down in history. He said admirable things of his own country. I will confine myself to what he stated on Cuba.

“…In the Assembly of the Organization of American States that begins today in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, we must initiate the process of wise rectifications of old errors committed.

“We, the Latin Americans who were recently here, a couple of weeks or months ago, had a grand summit within the Rio Group in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil. There we made a commitment. The commitment, which was taken down in writing and unanimously by all of Latin America, is that in this San Pedro assembly, by majority vote or consensus, that old and worn error committed in 1962 of expelling the Cuban people from this organization would have to be amended.

“We must not go from this assembly, my dear dignitaries, without repealing the decree of that 8th meeting which sanctioned an entire people for having proclaimed socialist ideas and principles, principles now practiced in all parts of the world, including the United States and Europe (Applause). Today, principles of seeking different development alternatives are evident precisely in the change that there has been in the United States with the election of President Barack Obama…

“We cannot go from this assembly without making amends for that error and that infamy because, on the basis of this Organization of American States resolution, in existence for more than four decades, an unjust and useless blockade has been maintained against this sister people of Cuba, precisely because none of its aims have been achieved, but what it has demonstrated is that here, a few kilometers from our country, on a little island, there is a people prepared to resist and to make sacrifices for their independence and sovereignty.

“… not doing so would make us accomplices of a 1962 resolution to expel a state from the Organization of American States simple because it has other ideas, other thoughts, and proclaims principles of a different democracy. And we are not going to be accomplices of that.

“…We cannot go from this assembly without repealing what was enacted in that epoch.

“An exceptional Honduran, called in our country – and one of our national heroes – José Cecilio del Valle, the sage Valle, stated on April 17, 1826, in his famous article ‘Sovereignty and non-intervention’ – we had just proclaimed our independence from the Spanish kingdom – “’The nations of the world are independent and sovereign. Whatever its territorial extension or number of inhabitants might have been, a nation must treat others with the same treatment that it desires to receive from these. A nation does not have the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another nation.’”

With those words of Cecilio del Valle and the mention of Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Morazán, Martí, Sandino and Bolívar, he concluded his speech.

A few minutes later, at the press conference after the opening of the Assembly, he responded to questions and reiterated principles. Then he gave the floor to Daniel Ortega, who was the author of one of the most profound and well-argued papers at the OAS Assembly. At Zelaya’s invitation, Fernando Lugo, president of Paraguay, and Rigoberto Menchú also spoke, expressing themselves in terms similar to Zelaya and Daniel.

The Assembly has been debating for hours. As I am concluding this Reflection, almost at nightfall, there is still no news of the decision. It is known that Zelaya’s speech was influential. Chávez is talking with [Venezuelan Foreign Minister] Maduro and urging him to firmly maintain that no resolution can be admitted that conditions the repeal of the unjust sanction against Cuba. Never has such rebellion been seen. Without any doubt, the battle is a hard one. Many countries are dependent on the index finger of one hand of the government of the United States pointing at the Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank or in any other direction for punishing rebelliousness. Having waged it is already a feat in itself on the part of the most rebellious. June 2, 2009 will be recalled by future generations.

Cuba is not an enemy of peace, nor reluctant to interchange or cooperation among countries of distinct political systems, but has been and always will be intransigent in the defense of its principles.

Fidel Castro Ruz – June 2, 2009

Darfur, the Israeli lobby & US Democrats

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Tony Logan

What does it mean for Africa when right wing end-of-the- world-is-near evangelical Christians join forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Center For Human Rights? What does it mean for African Americans when Bush, Obama, and nearly all last year’s presidential candidates from both parties encourage the continuation of an African civil war rather than a political settlement between the parties? What does it mean when 21st century PR firms employ FaceBook, slick viral marketing and millions of dollars to create a simple, satisfying, feel-good excuse for military intervention on the African continent? –from Is There a Save Darfur Industrial Complex?

But Save Darfur has gotten into hot water with aid groups helping the refugees of the conflict.

In February it began a high-profile advertising campaign that included full-page newspaper ads, television spots and billboards calling for more aggressive action in Darfur, including the imposition of a no-flight zone over the region.

Aid groups and even some activists say banning flights could do more harm than good, because it could stop aid flights. Many aid groups fly white airplanes and helicopters that may look similar to those used by the Sudanese government, putting their workers at risk in a no-flight zone.

Sam Worthington, the president and chief executive of InterAction, a coalition of aid groups, complained to Mr. Rubenstein by e-mail that Save Darfur’s advertising was confusing the public and damaging the relief effort.

“I am deeply concerned by the inability of Save Darfur to be informed by the realities on the ground and to understand the consequences of your proposed actions,” Mr. Worthington wrote.

He noted that contrary to assertions in its initial ads, Save Darfur did not represent any of the organizations working in Darfur, and he accused it of “misstating facts.” He said its endorsement of plans that included a no-flight zone and the use of multilateral forces “could easily result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”

Another aid group, Action Against Hunger, said in a statement last week that a forced intervention by United Nations troops without the approval of the Sudanese government “could have disastrous consequences that risk triggering a further escalation of violence while jeopardizing the provision of vital humanitarian assistance to millions of people.”

Aid groups also complain that Save Darfur, whose budget last year was $15 million, does not spend that money on aid for the long-suffering citizens of the region.

from the New York Times June 2, 2007 Darfur Advocacy Group Undergoes a Shake-Up

‘The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum…

‘The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year…

from The Washington Post at http://www.overbrook.org/newsletter/06_07/pdfs/AJWS_Washington_Post.pdf

Hillary Clinton on Darfur as she calls for more Pentagon intervention and wars abroad. This is a woman that has no problem with genocide when committed by the US and/ or Israel.

Biden calls for military force in Darfur speaks for itself as he directly calls for a US military assault on Sudan See Joe Biden: Darfur as he calls for US troops to attack Sudan

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime!

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Eric Verlo

A.N.S.W.E.R. has 7 Reasons to March on DC. We can borrow them!
– The war in Afghanistan is expanding and widening.
– 350,000 U.S. troops and US-paid contractors still occupy Iraq.
– Israel’s Siege of Gaza remains in place, with backing of Washington.
– Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the policy of renditions.
– Air strikes on Pakistan are killing an increasingly number of civilians.
– The real Pentagon war budget is over $1.3 trillion annually.
– More than 20 million people are now unemployed and under-employed.

7 Reasons You Should March on the Pentagon on March 21, 2009

1
The war in Afghanistan is expanding and widening. President Obama announced last week that another 17,000 troops are on their way to Afghanistan. Only 18 percent of Afghanis support this escalation and only 34 percent of the people of the United States approve of the added troops despite the president’s popularity, according to the Washington Post/ABC poll announced on February 17, 2009. This is a colonial war. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, was not involved in the decision to add more occupying troops into his country. Rather, he was “informed of the deployments in a telephone call with Obama” on February 17, according to the Washington Post (February 18, 2009).

2
About 350,000 U.S. troops and U.S.-paid private contractors (mercenaries) still occupy Iraq. The Iraqi people want the occupation to end. Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is insisting that only two of the 14 combat brigades in Iraq exit in 2009. The war and occupation of Iraq costs $430 million each day. If the U.S. government were to end the military occupation, any and all future Iraqi governments would return to a position of political independence from the economic and political dictates of the United States. Iraq’s anti-colonial legacy has created a political reality that prohibits the country from becoming like Kuwait or Saudi Arabia–an out-and-out dependency on U.S. imperialism. That is the real reason that the U.S. government fears a complete disengagement from Iraq and an end to its military occupation.

3
Israel’s Siege of Gaza remains in place, with the full backing of Washington. The U.S. government has continued to fund Israel’s war and blockade against the people of Gaza. The Pentagon provided the funding, and technical and logistical support for the establishment of the Israeli war machine, including its massive cluster and white phosphorous bomb arsenal, and the country’s large cache of nuclear bombs.

4
The new Justice Department has announced that it will continue the policy of renditions, meaning the CIA and Pentagon will capture and kidnap individuals anywhere in the world and transfer them to other countries. “The Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.” (LA Times, Feb. 1, 2009)

5
The new administration has stepped up the air strikes that are killing an increasingly large number of Pakistani civilians. Unmanned drone bombing attacks violate Pakistani sovereignty and are creating an ocean of resentment and anger inside of Pakistan. The U.S. government has no right to carry out these drone bombing strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The people of the United States would not accept the legitimacy of other governments ordering air attacks in the United States. We must openly and loudly reject such tactics by the government that speaks in our name and spends our tax dollars for such aggression.

6
The real Pentagon war budget is over $1.3 trillion annually. This is greater than the combined total of most of the other countries in the world, including all the NATO countries, and Russia and China. Some label this “waste spending” because it spends precious resources to build exotic and high cost weapons, a new generation of nuclear weapons, and space-based war fighting capabilities, while filling the coffers of the big investors (i.e., the biggest banks) in the war corporations. Pentagon contracting is often based on guaranteed “cost-plus” contracts that reward price gouging since corporate profit is based on a fixed percentage above their expenses. Another label for this process is “extreme corruption” and theft from the public treasury.

7
More than 20 million people are now unemployed and under-employed. Nine million families are either in foreclosure or are at risk of foreclosure this year, according to the statistics just released by the government. Forty-seven million people are without health care. College tuition hikes are soaring and millions of students are at risk of being forced out of school. The people want change. They don’t want a simple tweaking of Bush’s criminal foreign policies. They want to put people’s needs before corporate greed. They want an end to wars of aggression that are wreaking havoc, death and destruction abroad, and diverting urgently needed resources in the service of semi-colonialism and Empire.

Eric Holder, ‘First Black’ or just another reactionary appointee by Barack Obama?

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Tony Logan

corporate-lawyer
Another Black Face to cover up the reactionary government of Barack Obama, Eric Holder has just been appointed US Attorney General. He was Clinton’s Deputy Attorney General after Clinton picked him up from Ronald Reagan’s team where he was one of Ronnie’s appointed judges. He also was part of the George Bush Senior team as well.

According to the Washington Post, Holder obtained his ‘critical support from a broad base of federal and state law enforcement groups as well as a bipartisan coalition of former Justice Department leaders, including one time deputy attorney general James B. Comey, former FBI director Louis J. Freeh and President George W. Bush’s terrorism and homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.’

Here he is talking in an interview 12 years ago in an interview with BNET Business Network…

Insight: What did you do to change the wave of violence that has overwhelmed the nation’s capital?

Eric Holder: I have taken a lot of grief for my attempt to make selling marijuana a felony in the district (Wash D.C.), not just a misdemeanor. I introduced the legislation in December that would make distribution and possession with the intent to distribute marijuana a five-year felony. I’ve been criticized for it by reporters in various publications, saying things like I have “reefer madness.” But what we found was that in 1991 about 11 percent of all juveniles who were arrested in the district tested positive for drugs. In 1996, we found that 62 percent of those who were arrested were now testing positive for drug use and that it was largely marijuana. And that is something we can change. Hearings are scheduled for April and I am hoping that we have enough support to push it through. (from A new sheriff at Justice)

As current Steering Committee member of The George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, Holder’s Black face will be seen as a key component of the effort by Barack Obama to convince the world that the illegality of the Bush Klan has come to a halt. But look at the policy statements, the links, and the structure of the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) and you see clearly that Holder will be nothing more nor less than a continuation by Obama of ex-President George Dubya Bush’s so-called ‘Global War on Terrorism’ (GWOT) agenda. Minus Guantanamo perhaps?, but still with injustice for all. Eric Holder is nothing more than just another reactionary appointee by Barack Obama and a corporate lawyer (Covington & Burling LLP) whose presence will change very little.

Nonviolent vigils will be death of Gazans

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Eric Verlo

GAZA PROTESTS PROLIFERATE! Demonstrators are occupying Israeli consulates, storming embassies, harassing pro-Israeli rallies, and spilling blood on Zionist memorials. Not that anything is working so far. Meanwhile, in non-stories for the press, the usual non-confrontational passivists are lighting candles in memory of the slain. Are they anticipating, in their non-violent wisdom, the eminent extinction of the Palestinians of Gaza? Pacifists seem more comfortable to commemorate the ideological sacrifice of martyrs sooner than advocate for the survival of the endangered.

Others are not content to mourn Zionism’s ultimate triumph. Here’s the best analysis yet I’ve encountered for antiwar strategists.

In Caracas, the protests have the support of the state. Venezuelan president Chavez expelled the Israeli Ambassador and called his nation’s Jews to repudiate Israel’s inhumanity in Gaza:

“Now I hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community speaks out against this barbarism. Do it. Don’t you strongly reject all acts of persecution?”

Here is the Free Palestine Alliance statement released January 9, 2008:

The Massacre Intensifies:

As we prepare this thirteenth FPA statement, the Zionist army was continuing what it does best the wholesale slaughter of children and unarmed civilians. As would be expected of the current state of affairs of the US-controlled international scene, the massacre of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is continuing despite yesterday’s feeble UN Security Council resolution that calls for Israel to immediately stop its attack. Actually, the US-Zionist leadership went the other way — more and more attacks. The Israeli Zionist army was given additional orders to escalate the conquest as it enters into a third phase of obliteration. Simultaneously as the Israeli cabinet was giving orders for a higher kill and destruction ratio, the US Senate was not going to be outdone by Zionists. It had to add to its long and shameful record. So it secretly issued a fast-tracked resolution fully supporting the ongoing massacre and giving Israel the needed cover. We ask, is this Senate resolution in the best interest of the people of the US?

But is it not the legacy and norm of the US-Israeli alliance to discard the will of the people of the US and the world. Is it not their norm to discard any and all UN resolutions that may remotely disagree with their strategic plans? The examples are far too many to list, including both UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions dating as far back as 1947.

Yesterday’s UN resolution was approved by 14 of the 15 nations that currently sit on the Security Council, with the US abstaining. As would be expected, the resolution did not address the deadly siege that has been imposed on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, nor did it condemn outright the fascistic actions of the Zionist polity.

Sadly, Palestinian victims have now reached at least 800 murdered and more than 3,300 injured. And these numbers are certain to climb substantially. Yesterday alone, fifty Palestinians were found murdered under their destroyed homes, some with their bodies already beginning to decompose. The Red Cross reported finding 4 near-death children slumped near and over their decomposing dead mothers. These children, like many others, were reported by the Red Cross to have been left without rescue in starvation and thirst for four full days around their killed mothers due to attacks on rescue workers.

On the very same day the UN Security Council resolution was issued, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that serves approximately 800,000 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip decided that it was forced to fully halt its services. This decision came following the killing of one of UNRWA’s truck drivers, and due to the extreme conditions imposed by the Zionist army on relief workers. The UNRWA also strongly condemned the Israeli cover-up used to justify the bombardment of the Al-Fakhoura school that murdered and injured over 100 children and their parents.

Come Out in Force Tomorrow:

The people of the US have a moral obligation to turn out in massive numbers tomorrow, Saturday, from Washington, DC to San Francisco, Los Angeles and in between, to send a clear message that this campaign of murder must stop at once. In DC, we will be right there to send a message to the Bush administration, the incoming Barak administration, and to the entire US Congress. In San Francisco, where the United Nations took its first founding steps, we can highlight the charade of UN resolutions and international diplomacy, pointing to the double standards and outright racist behavior of the US and its allies. In Los Angeles and all other cities and towns, we can and must mobilize to join in protest in the largest possible numbers. This is the time to stand for what is moral and just. We cannot continue funding Israel while the people of the US are in dire need for funds right here to rescue homes and towns from collapse.

Rather than pay for the destruction of the Gaza Strip, let us pay for the construction of roadways, parks, and schools.

Rather than destroy thousands of Palestinian homes, let us fix the collapsing housing market and keep people in their own homes.

Rather than send more people homeless, let us protect folks from evictions and foreclosures.

Rather than kill doctors, nurses, and relief workers, let us build hospitals and provide health care to the millions without it.

This is our time to let Obama know that he could very easily stimulate both the economy and the morality of the US by stopping all funds used to kill babies and their mothers. Instead, we can invest these same funds in the education and upbringing of millions of impoverished children, right here in the US.

This is indeed our time, folks, and we must come out to lead the US Congress and administrations to the moral high ground. The interest of the US and its people is best served by supporting the construction of US infrastructure, housing, schools, hospitals, and by creating jobs at a living wage. Rather than kill Arab unionists, let us support strengthening unions and their demand for a respectable life and wages.

This is our time to show that Palestine is but a symbol for ALL just struggles. Struggles we all wage every day in various forms. The massacre against the Palestinian people should focus a very bright spotlight on what is wrong with US policies: US tax dollars are being sent to the Israeli army under US diplomatic cover, and are being used to boost corporations that manufacture military hardware, to conquer and destroy countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than rescuing a failing nation from its impending economic depression.

Signs of Defeat:

We regard the UN Security Council Resolution as a fig leaf void of legitimacy. For one thing, it came 13 days following the massacre, and after more than 4,100 Palestinian casualties between killed and injured. It appears that key power-brokers at the UN had hoped that by waiting long enough (13 days) without action, the Zionists could in fact secure a political and military victory.

While the resolution attempts to provide a diplomatic cover for the Israelis and the US as a way out of their unattainable goals, it is nonetheless a clear indication that the ongoing conquest is unable to achieve any Zionist political gain. In fact, politically speaking, the US-Zionist-Arab regime tripartite axis is only achieving the very opposite of what they had intended through this massacre: (1) the Palestinians have achieved massive international, Arab, and Palestinian support; (2) the possibility for appointing a client regime in the Gaza Strip is non-existent; (3) the sustenance of the Abbas PA in its current formation has become very uncertain; and (4) the little legitimacy some Arab regimes have is that much more diminished.

To the extreme dismay of the US and Zionist leaders, the UN resolution demands an immediate stop to the attacks and the opening of all crossings; and it opens the gates for humanitarian aid. Hence, rejected by the Zionist leadership at once. Due to the weight of the pressure on US Arab allies, who could not under any circumstance return home empty-handed, the US had no choice but to abstain rather than give its usual veto — a way to give the US-supported despots a piece of paper to wave in the face of a sea of millions and millions in protest everywhere. Ironically, the gravity of the massacre made a full circle, compromising the stability of the alliance that is responsible for its implementation. The more violent the attack, the more stubborn the resistance, the more widespread the support, and the weaker the grip of despotic regimes.

Let us join the millions who have taken to the streets thus far, including today, in thousands of towns and cities in the world. There are those who are volunteering as doctors, nurses, and rescue workers, with many already killed and injured; there are those who are giving blood to hospitals and to the Red Cross and Red Crescent; those who are protesting; many are writing, painting, dancing and singing for freedom and liberation; and there are those who are holding sit-ins, and those who are giving flowers of appreciation to the Venezuelan government for their principled stance. All are out, and all are outraged.

Come and join!

Take your stand and come out tomorrow. Make it known that this massacre cannot continue!

All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People!

The Free Palestine Alliance

January 9, 2009

And this report from A.N.S.W.E.R. about Sunday’s march on DC:

From Washington, DC to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Worldwide–Hundreds of Thousands March to Let Gaza Live!

On Sat., Jan. 10, hundreds of cities, and hundreds of thousands of people, responded to the call for an International Day of Emergency Action to support the people of Gaza. Outside the United States, marches took place in London, Edinburgh, Cairo, Athens, Kuala Lumpur, Beirut, Seoul, Mexico City, Jakarta, Montreal, Paris, Barcelona, Marseilles, Lyon, Oslo, Berlin, Bern, Karachi, Nablus, New Delhi, Amman, Sarajevo, Ramallah, Stockholm, and Tokyo. The protests continue to grow — today, another 250,000 took to the streets in Spain and more than 100,000 in Algeria.

In the U.S., the Day of Action was initiated on just one week’s notice by a call from the ANSWER Coalition, Muslim American Society Freedom, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab Americans, and Al-Awda – International Palestine Right to Return Coalition. In Washington DC, over 20,000 took to the streets in the freezing rain to demand, “Let Gaza Live!” The streets were so backed up that thousands of people in buses and cars were still arriving after the march had left Lafayette Park.

The demonstration began with a rally at the White House. Featured speakers included former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was just on a humanitarian relief mission attempting to bring supplies to Gaza when the boat she was on was intentionally struck by an Israeli military vessel; Mahdi Bray, Executive Director, Muslim American Society Freedom; Rev. Graylan Hagler, National President of Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chairman, National Council of Arab Americans; Ralph Nader; Paul Zulkowitz, Jews Against the Occupation; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, attorney and co-founder, Partnership for Civil Justice; and others.

The spirited march then led to the Washington Post, where demonstrators denounced the paper for its biased pro-Israeli coverage of the massacre and its complete blackout of protest activities in the United States.

In San Francisco, 10,000 took part in the march and rally. The rally included a huge outpouring from the local Arab community, and energetic participation from Bay Area youth.

A crowd of 2000 demonstrators confronted a heavy police presence in downtown Orlando for the “Let Gaza Live: Florida Statewide March for Palestine” called by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition/Florida—just six days prior. The demonstration is the largest anti-war demonstration in Florida in more than a decade and certainly the largest ever protest in Florida calling for a free Palestine. Police tried to intimidate marchers by initially searching all bags, forcing protesters to remove sticks from signs, and denying the use of amplified sound. Organizers and protesters challenged and pushed back their unwarranted scare tactics, and the protest turned out to be a powerful success.

In Los Angeles, 10,000 people participated in a regional mass march and rally to “Let Gaza Live” at the Westwood Federal Building. Hundreds of Palestinian flags and signs reading “Stop bombing Gaza!” and “The real terrorists: U.S./Israel war machine!” lined all sides of the street and the lawn in front of the federal government headquarters. It was the largest protest and the first major march in Southern California since the Israeli bombing campaign and invasion began.

A funeral procession led the march with makeshift coffins draped with Palestinian flags, representing the hundreds of people killed by Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. Hundreds of children followed, along with a huge, hand-made Palestinian flag, in a contingent organized by the Palestinian American Women’s Association.

The worldwide movement is continuing to grow with more protests today, Jan. 11. There will be countless other actions in the days to come. Today in New York City, the police carried out a violent assault against those marching in mid-town Manhattan in support of the people of Palestine. A number of people were injured and arrested.

With the support of the United States, the Israeli military machine has expanded its invasion into urban areas of Gaza. The death toll among Palestinians is now nearly 900, with many thousands wounded. The injured and hungry of Gaza have no relief. We must do everything in our power to deepen and broaden this movement in the coming days.

Dennis Kucinich: Wake Up America!

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Thomas Mc

“Wake up America. We have trillions for a war machine and the banks while our government stands by and sniffs at the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, where Israel is blocking aid for wounded Palestinians. Here’s today’s Washington Post. It says,

‘The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it found at least 15 bodies and several children emaciated but alive in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for 4 days. 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with 4 young children lying next to their dead mothers.’

That’s a quote. Today, US tax dollars, US jets, and US helicopters provided to Israel are enabling the slaughter in Gaza. The administration enables Israel to press forward with the attack against defenseless civilians, blocks efforts at promoting a cease-fire at the UN, and refuses to make Israel compliant with conditions that arms shipments will not be used for aggression. Israel is going to receive $30 billion in a ten year period for military assistance, without having to abide by any humanitarian principles, international laws, or standards of basic human decency. Wake up America.”

—Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

Opportunity to address new Colorado US Senator Michael Bennet on Saturday

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter and his pick to replace Senator Ken Salazar, Denver School Superintendent Michael Bennet, will be visiting Colorado Springs on Saturday, Jan 10. You’re invited to meet the two at the Penrose Public Library at 12noon. COME AT 11AM, make them heed their constituents and stop the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and GAZA.

Let’s show them that Colorado isn’t just about soldiers and weapons contractors earning their livelihood from the expenditure of ordnance.

From A.N.S.W.E.R.:

The Red Cross has condemned Israel for violating international law by blocking ambulance and rescue efforts for wounded civilians. There are thousands of wounded people. The Red Cross rescue team had reported of one of many instances: [we] “found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up,” the statement said. “In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses” in one of the houses, it added.

The Red Cross declared that Israel had violated international law in its failure to allow for care and treatment of wounded people. The Red Cross had asked Israeli forces to allow them to access these children for four days and the IOF, which remained within 80 meters from the houses, refused to allow the Red Cross through while also refusing to help the dying families.

The Washington Post reports: “The United Nations on Thursday said it was indefinitely suspending all humanitarian aid deliveries in the Gaza Strip, citing a series of Israeli attacks on U.N. facilities and personnel during the 13-day Israeli offensive.

“The suspension appeared likely to deepen a sense of crisis in Gaza, where more than half the territory’s 1.5 million people live on food aid from the United Nations and where water, power and cooking gas are all in short supply.”

The people of Gaza are enduring immense hardship. The must know that they are not alone. The world stands with them. The only thing that will end this criminal invasion and war is the massive outpouring of the people in Washington, D.C., and in countries around the world. It is the people who are making the difference. That is what January 10th is all about.

From Students for Justice in Palestine:

SJP condemns this Israeli escalation of violence against Gazans in the harshest of manners and highlights that it was forewarned by Israel’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai as a “greater Shoah” the Hebrew word for the Nazi holocaust.

Under International law and standing UN conventions, destroying a people in part or in full is considered ethnic cleansing.

The full siege of Gaza is leading to deaths due to lack of access to medical essentials, sickness, lack of sanitation and lack of access to basic resources that are there and protected as basic human rights. The Palestinians dying in Gaza were pushed out by Israel, forcefully and illegally in an effort to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Now Israel is killing them inside the refugee camps.

Peace can only be achieved when Israeli apartheid is ended and Palestinians are granted their national, political and civil rights, as well as the right to return as guaranteed under international law.

US will use Mumbai events to increase its wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Tony Logan

The evidence is already in that the US government will use the Mumbai events as justification for pushing more of its war machine further into Afghanistan and Pakistan. To do so is crucial in in its geopolitical battle plans against Russia and China, and a Barack Obama directed Pentagon battle plan is already made up to do just that.

Yes, Mumbai provides the perfect selling point to the USA public which will be easily convinced that the fight now is against ‘terrorism’, and not to just make money for the US military-industrial complex. Fool the US public once, fool them twice, they’re ready to be led by the nose all the time!

What is ‘the evidence’ being used by the US war machine’s propaganda platoon? Most of it hinges on the testimony of just one peasant captured, who is now under constant torture. Hey! That’s a method the US government and US military loves! Beat up on the stray ‘dogs’! They’re just like demented and sadistic teenagers when it comes to that. Details Emerge From Sole Arrested Gunman Yes! How fitting that the Washington Post propagandists are already for military combat here!

‘Attention, American Readership! Hut one two three. Hut one two three. Forward march onto the Indian subcontinent with ‘our boys’!’

Anybody who thinks that General in Chief Barack Obama is The Peace President will soon be alleviated from their delusion.

Oval Office is NOT an Alzheimers Ward!

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Thomas Mc

Their surge failed. GOP retreats from Colorado invasion, and preparing for a crushing defeat everywhere.

Treasury Secretary, now in charge of bailout, says he “regrets” being 100% wrong about US economy.

Say it ain’t so, Joe “the Plumber” purged from voter rolls by GOP attempts to block voting?

Conservative Washington Post endorses Obama.

“I’m John McCain, and you WILL listen to me!”

In Missouri, RepubliKKKans have gone from burning crosses, to
burning Obama signs.

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Oct 17 notes, thomasmc.com.

Human Rights Watch is a US State Department vehicle, not a genuine human rights organization

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Tony Logan

The broadening conflict between the US and Russia has brought to the fore the role of the Human Rights Watch in promoting US State Department and Pentagon propaganda. They do this by hiding themselves behind their name, which leads the public to think that they are an independent group of concerned world citizens merely working for human rights observance.

However, a brief visit to their web site alone should set off some alarm bells. Human Rights Watch That’s right! There is no interest shown by this organization about human rights abuses by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan! Somalia, too, is off their radar! These three countries are not mentioned on their web site! At least not on the front page, and I couldn’t locate anything at all on other pages either.

When one sees such a thing and thinks about it a tad, then one begins to wonder about where the funding comes from for a group called Human Rights Watch? Here is Source Watch about the funding…

‘On January 1, 2005 they obtained a five-year, $15 million challenge grant from the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation. “The Sandlers and their children will donate $3 million a year for five years through the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation as long as Human Rights Watch raises $6 million annually in matching funds from first-time donors or existing donors who increase their contributions.” [2]’

So who are the Sandler Family and their Sandler Foundation? We have to go to wikipedia to find out this about Herb Sandler. Yes, he is a billionaire Democratic Party promoter of the group, banker and businessman.

We need to inform the public more about these billionaire promoters of US State Department human rights propaganda who push the Pentagon program for US world dominance. It is not only Human Rights Watch that is a US State Department vehicle for propaganda dissemination, but also the Carter Foundation, where one can quickly find out (if you think to look?) that it too is head up by another billionaire. I am not talking about Jimmy Carter either, but rather John Jay Moore, who is director of the Board of Trustees of the Carter Center, another human rights constantly blathering group respected so much by so many Democratic Party voting liberal types.

So when you hear Human Rights Watch running on about such and such, or so and so, ask yourself, do you really want American billionaires to be defining ‘human rights’ for the world? Is it up to us to just blindly follow the billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, et al when they tell us who are supposedly being bad guys, and who are supposedly respecting human rights throughout the world? These American billionaires run US foreign policy even as they might be temporarily a little bit at odds with one president or the other. They are not grand defenders of human rights at all.

So back to Human Rights Watch for one more look at them and what they are really doing in the world about us. Who is behind Human Rights Watch? (2004)

Here below is the part about who is funding the HRW… You will see that there are lots of other American billionaires doing it beside Big Wig Businessman Sandler and his ‘foundation’. Do you think that these are the folks who really back human rights world wide? I don’t, and neither should you.

DONORS OF $100,000 OR MORE
Dorothy and Lewis Cullman
The Aaron Diamond Foundation
Irene Diamond
The Ford Foundation
The Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett Fund
Estate of Anne Johnson
The J. M. Kaplan Fund
The Fanny and Leo Koerner Charitable Trust
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The John Merck Fund
The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation
Novib, The Dutch Organization for Development Corporation,
The Overbrook Foundation
Oxfam
Donald Pels
The Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing Trust
The Rockefeller Foundation
Marion and Herbert Sandler, The Sandler Family Supporting Foundation
Susan and George Soros
Shelby White and Leon Levy

DONORS OF $25,000 – $99,999

The Arca Foundation
Helen and Robert Bernstein
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
Nikki and David Brown
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Compton Foundation, Inc.
Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Davis
The Dr. Seuss Foundation
Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller
Jack Edelman
Epstein Philanthropies
Federation Internationalbacktheyin thee des Ligues des Droits de L’Homme
Barbara Finberg
General Service Foundation
Abby Gilmore and Arthur Freierman
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund
Katherine Graham, The Washington Post Company
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Hudson News
Independence Foundation
The Isenberg Family Charitable Trust
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation
Robert and Ardis James
Jesuit Refugee Service
Nancy and Jerome Kohlberg
Lyn and Norman Lear
Joshua Mailman
Medico International
Moriah Fund, Inc.
Ruth Mott Fund
Kathleen Peratis and Richard Frank
Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation
Ploughshares Fund
Public Welfare Foundation, Inc.
Anita and Gordon Roddick
Edna and Richard Salomon
Lorraine and Sid Sheinberg
Margaret R. Spanel
Time Warner Inc.
U.S. Jesuit Conference
Warner Brothers, Inc.
Edie and Lew Wasserman
Maureen White and Steven Rattner
Malcolm Wiener and Carolyn Seely Wiener
The Winston Foundation for World Peace

How the US and Georgia violated the South Ossetia peace plan

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Tony Logan

The Russians have issued a peace plan for Georgia and the US to accept, and SURPRISE!
It’s the same peace plan that was in place before, which the US and Georgia violated by entering and attacking South Ossetia. The peace plan calls for non- aggression in South Ossetia to be monitored by peacekeeping troops. FACTBOX-Peace plan for Georgia: what is it? This peace plan is essentially the same one that the European Union has already proposed and that was already once in place.

However, it is obvious to all that the US and Georgian governments do not feel in the least obligated to abide by this plan since they have already violated it once by unilatrally sending troops into South Ossetia. Further the official US government propaganda mills in the US (the New York Times, Washington Post, George Dubya Bush, Rice, etc.) have made it clear with their continued belligerency that this attack on South Ossetia was only the beginning of the continued US government plan to now constantly attack Russia. They have no desire at all to retreat despite the human suffering their war plans are causing. They want to control the natural resources of Asia for US corporate interests and that is all that counts for them.

It seems clear that this is the new Republican plan to try to advance John McCain’s chances for entering into the White House, too, and since the Democrats share the same foreign policy goals of the Republicans they will not be able to counter the Republican offensive but will instead echo everything the Bush Administration does. The Republican plan is to simply reignite Cold War rhetoric against the nationalist capitalist regime of the country today named Russia, and to attack the Democratic Party for being supposedly weak in this campaign.

Liberal pacifists and academic Left Libertarians in the Peace Movement are also not prepared to do anything against this new neocon propaganda offensive against Russia. They also tag along with the Republicans spewing out constant anti- Chinese and anti- Russia vitriol all on their own. Their mantra has always been merely a call to equally and incessantly blame victims of US aggression alongside the blame they toss out against the US government for causing the chaos and conflict in the world today.

But how can a US Antiwar Movement be built on such a foundation like that? In fact, you hardly see these people active even going through the motions of organizing a US Antiwar Movement. It is all talk and writing for the liberal community that they are engaged in and propagandizing for, and nothing of real organizing an Antiwar Movement. By equalizing responsibility as they do, in fact they expose themselves as being US nationalists themselves despite their criticisms of the US corporate government, simply because who is to blame is not equal at all in the least.

Russia and China are now engaged by the US government in a very real war of worldwide proportions, and yet the public in the US is not even vaguely aware in the least of what their own corporate dictatorship government has planned for us all. Where will the next new fighting be started by the militarists in the White House? How can they be stopped without total disaster occurring? The future indeed does look grim.

One aspect of interest is how the US government used Georgia to muscle out the interests of all the Western European countries besides the United Kingdom This fighting has been a US power government play to mold NATO as it wants it to be molded, the Europeans be damned. See the Wall Street Journal commentary… Splits Emerge Within EU

Russia should not take any US talk of peace seriously, since the US government’s actions since the fall of the exSoviet Union have made it already clear that the US corporations merely want to beat down Russia with a big stick.

Troubles in Peacekeeping Land, Darfur

Posted on July 26, 2008 by Tony Logan

UNITED NATIONS, July 23 — Rwanda has warned that it will withdraw its 3,000 peacekeepers from a U.N.-backed mission in the Darfur region of Sudan if the United Nations refuses to retain an alleged Rwandan war criminal as its second-highest-ranking commander there, according to U.S. and U.N. officials… Rwanda Threatens Darfur Pullout if U.N. Removes General

Yes, How embarrassing to have war criminals in charge of ‘UN peacekeeping’, however there is no word yet if Americans will need to get rid of war criminals George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before the US can continue to direct ‘peacekeeping’ in Darfur? What do you think?

Notice also how according to this Washington Post reportage the US government is asking that the war criminal remain in place as a ‘peacekeeper’ general. Amazing stuff! Wonder what the group ‘Save Darfur’ has to say about this affair?

Remember, too, that the United Nations ‘International Criminal Court’ just charged the Sudanese president, Bashir, with being a war criminal. And now just days later, the press learns that the United Nations troops in Darfur have a war criminal general leading a portion of its command! How easy it is for certain war criminals to lead ‘peacekeeping missions’. The UN has certainly stamped with its approval war criminal Bush’s ‘peacekeeping’ in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

US had NO enemies in the Middle East before Israel

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Thomas Mc

Former White House Liar Tony Snow died of cancer. Conservatives want the flag flown at half mast, or perhaps invade a Middle Eastern country in his name.

Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran.

Iraqi PM ready to oust US from Green Zone.

A 19th century president for a 21st century world power? McCain “learning” to use the internet. Now, at 50 I may be an old coot who doesn’t even have a cell phone (I refuse to be “on call” 24/7 for the rest of the world), but I bought my first computer and taught myself programing back in the 70s. My mother has been on the internet since the 90s. If McCain is just now “catching up,” how fast do you think he can comprehend the realities and needs of techological society?

The filthy-rich are doing just fine, thank you. Washington Post opinionator George Will defends Phil Grahamm, calls the rest of America “crybabies.”

Barack Obama’s poll ratings plummet after FISA vote.

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s notes July 13, thomasmc.com.

McCain was dubbed the “POW Songbird”

Posted on June 1, 2008 by Eric Verlo

An excerpt from prisoner of war John McCain’s November 9, 1967 interview for the North Vietnamese newspaper NHAN DAN:
McCain told vietcong about US attack procedures
Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain have released a fact sheet on the highly decorated hero’s service in Vietnam. If this is reminiscent of the Swiftboat shits against John Kerry, at least these vets have the official records and news reports. Apparently John McCain III crashed a total of five planes, received one and a half medals per hour of service, and while the admiral’s son was pampered in the Hanoi Hilton, his extensive singing earned him the name “POW Songbird.”

FACT SHEET: Military record of John Sidney McCain III

Both McCain III’s father and grandfather were Admirals in the United States Navy. His father Admiral John S. ”Junior” McCain was commander of U.S. forces in Europe – later commander of American forces in Vietnam while McCain III was being held prisoner of war. His grandfather John S. McCain, Sr. commanded naval aviation at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

McCain III, like his father and grandfather, also attended the United States Naval Academy. McCain III finished near the bottom of his graduating class in 1958.

McCain III lost five U.S. Navy aircraft

1 – Student pilot McCain III lost jet number one in 1958 when he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay while practicing landings.

2 – Pilot McCain III lost another plane two years later while he was deployed in the Mediterranean. ”Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula, he took out some power lines which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral.

3 – Pilot McCain III lost number three in 1965 when he was returning from flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game. McCain III radioed, ”I’ve got a flameout” and ejected at one thousand feet. The plane crashed to the ground and McCain III floated to a deserted beach.

4 – Combat pilot McCain III lost his fourth on July 29, 1967, soon after he was assigned to the USS Forrestal as an A-4 Skyhawk combat pilot. While waiting his turn for takeoff, an accidently fired rocket slammed into McCain Jr’s. plane. He escaped from the burning aircraft, but the explosions that followed killed 134 sailors, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and threatened to sink the ship.

5 – Combat pilot McCain III lost a fifth plane three months later (Oct. 26, 1967) during his 23rd mission over North Vietnam when he failed to avoid a surface-to-air missile. McCain III ejected from the plane breaking both arms and a leg in the process and subsequently parachuted into Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi. After being pulled from the lake by the North Vietnamese, McCain III was bayoneted in his left foot and shoulder and struck by a rifle butt. He was then transported to the Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton.

1973 New York Daily News labeled POW McCain III a “PW Songbird”

On McCain III’s fourth day of being denied medical treatment, slapped, and threatened with death by the communist (they were demanding military information in exchange for medical treatment), McCain III broke and told his interrogator, ”O.K., I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.” U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1973 article written by former POW John McCain.

It was then that the communist learned that McCain III’s father was Admiral John S. McCain, the soon-to-be commander of all U.S. Forces in the Pacific. The Vietnamese rushed McCain III to Gai Lam military hospital (U.S. government documents), a medical facility normally unavailable for U.S. POWs.

By Nov. 9, 1967 (U.S. government documents) Hanoi press was quoting McCain III describing his mission including the number of aircraft in his flight, information about rescue ships, and the order of which U.S. attacks would take place.

While still in North Vietnam’s military hospital, McCain III gave an interview to prominent French television reporter Francois Chalais for a series titled Life in Hanoi. Chalais’ interview with McCain III was aired in Europe.

Vietnamese doctors operated on McCain’s Leg in early December, 1967. Six weeks after he was shot down, McCain was taken from the hospital and delivered to a U.S. POW camp.

In May of 1968, McCain III allowed himself to be interviewed by two North Vietnamese generals at separate times.” May 14, 1973 article written by former POW John McCain In August 1968, other POWs learned for the first time that John McCain III had been taken prisoner.

On June 5, 1969, the New York Daily News reported in a article headlined REDS SAY PW SONGBIRD IS PILOT SON OF ADMIRAL,

“…Hanoi has aired a broadcast in which the pilot son of United States Commander in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, purportedly admits to having bombed civilian targets in North Vietnam and praises medical treatment he has received since being taken prisoner…”

The Washington Post explained McCain III’s broadcast:

“The English-Language broadcast beamed at South Vietnam was one of a series using American prisoners. It was in response to a plea by Defense Secretary Melvin S. Laird, May 19, that North Vietnam treat prisoners according to the humanitarian standards set forth by the Geneva Convention.”

In 1970, McCain III agreed to an interview with Dr. Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist who was living in Cuba at the time.

The meeting between Barral and McCain III (which was photographed by the Vietnamese) took place away from the prison at the office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi (declassified government document). During the meeting, POW McCain sipped coffee and ate oranges and cakes with the Cuban.

While talking with Barral, McCain III further seriously violated the military Code of Conduct by failing to evade answering questions ”to the utmost of his ability” when he, according government documents, helped Barral by answering questions in Spanish, a language McCain had learned in school. The interview was published in January 1970.

McCain III was released from North Vietnam March 15, 1973

In 1993, during one of his many trips back to Hanoi, McCain asked the Vietnamese not to make public any records they hold pertaining to returned U.S. POWs. McCain III claims, that while a POW, he tried to kill himself.

McCain III was awarded “medals for valor” equal to nearly a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat

For 23 combat missions (an estimated 20 hours over enemy territory), the U.S. Navy awarded McCain III, the son of famous admirals, a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals.

“McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat,” explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs — the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon.

“Since McCain got 28 medals,” Bell continued, “that equals to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat. There were infantry guys — grunts on the ground — who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I’m sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison. The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down.”

No one is faulting John McCain for collaborating with his Vietnamese captors. He survived captivity, however arduous or not. It is enough to say he is a survivor. It would be too much though to call him a hero.

US is not sniping indiscriminantly 1-2-3

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Eric Verlo

The good news is that US sniper teams may not be shooting at everyone they come across anymore, as has been alleged though seldom reported. After all, the rules of war apply to snipers just as they would ordinary soldiers or paintballers: don’t shoot at someone who’s not a combatant, who’s unarmed, or who’s otherwise surrendering. But under pressure to up their kills, US snipers are defying the Hague Conventions with such innovations as 1) bait/entrapment, 2) getting go-ahead to assassinate, and 3) using fingerprint identification to confirm eligibility for execution.

1. Bait and switch
The Asymmetric Warfare Group issues to US snipers “drop items,” insurgent-type items which may be planted on Iraqis they’ve shot, but much more productively, to use as bait to lure passing Iraqis, tempting empty-handed civilians to become item-wielding insurgents whom you don’t have to get permission to shoot. The Washington Post reports:

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

2. Under suspicion is as good as being condemned
US snipers are executing targets if they can be confirmed as being suspects. With the cross hairs of your sniper scope aimed at your chosen Iraqi or Afghan, you can await authorization to pull the trigger based on learning the person’s identity, whether by informer or a shouted inquiry. Then according to the US rules of engagement you can terminate him. Here’s an example from the International Herald Tribune.

“From his position about 100 yards away, Master Sergeant Troy Anderson had a clear shot of the Afghan man standing outside a residential compound in a small village near the Pakistan border last October. And when Captain Dave Staffel, the Special Forces officer in charge, gave the order to shoot, Anderson fired a single bullet into the man’s head, killing him instantly.

…the shooting, near the village of Hasan Kheyl last October, was a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement. The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.”

3. Coming soon: fingerprint and biometric matching
In early 2008 US snipers will be given a more efficient system for making split decisions about whether their target may be summarily liquidated. Now with the subject in your sights, you can await instructions from an intelligence database about whether your target has a fingerprint, retina scan, or biometric profile in the records as a suspected insurgent. In which case, be he standing idle, detained or captive, you can shoot him. Read this account from the Washington Post about the JEFF:

“…the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities (JEFF) project or “lab in a box,” analyzes biometrics. It will be delivered to Iraq at the beginning of 2008, the Navy said, to help distinguish insurgents from civilians.

…the military has been scanning the irises and taking the fingerprints of Iraqis, feeding a biometrics data base in West Virginia. To date, a few ad hoc labs have processed about 85,000 pieces of evidence taken from weapons caches or roadside devices.

Each collapsible, sand-colored, 20-by-20-foot unit has its own generator and satellite link. If things go as planned, data will beamed to the Biometric Fusion Center to check against more than a million Iraqi fingerprints.

The next stage is to miniaturize, create “a backpack lab,” so that soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list, [says the JEFF weapon designer] “A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”

Lee Bollinger- who is this attack dog for Bush?

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Tony Logan

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came and went from New York City with his message for a just Peace in the Middle East, and the US media went into a hysteria. Lead attack dog for going to war against Iran was Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, who invited Ahmadinejad into his den so that he could barrage him with a Right Wing temper tantrum for the US corporate press to disseminate.

Why would such a nice ‘liberal’ do this work for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? After all, isn’t Lee Bollinger a free speech champion as he is most often portrayed in the US press?

Well it turns out that this description of him doled out time and time again by our bullshit press is just a bunch of crap. Bollinger has no liberal credentials other than being a lawyer. He took a case or two that dealt with some ‘free speech’ questions but that hardly makes this guy Mr. Free Speech at all. It seems that he never exercises ‘free speech’ except to encourage invasions and bombardments of countries like Iran?

Try to find anything critical of Bush and his regime made by Bollinger over the last 7 years on the last 7 years via a search on the Internet? Good luck…. Here is what you will find though. You will find that Mr Liberal is actually a corporate hack on the board of the establishment Right Wing Washington Post along with Warren Buffett and Melinda Gates, amongst other corporate criminals now parked there. The Post is not liberal at all, so why can’t the press correctly identify Bollinger as being a Right Wing hack rather than calling him a champion of free speech? In fact, Lee Bollinger is your garden variety Zionist inside the US Establishment.

The President of Iran surely knew who he was dealing with when he decided to accept the speaking engagement at Columbia University. Despite the stupidity and disingenuousness of his remarks about gays in Iran, it was he who came off as advocating peace though. Something that neither Bush nor Bollinger do.

The US has to mislabel and hide who and what Lee Bollinger really is from the public and even then his belligerence was so open and obnoxious that he actually hurt the US government case that going to the war with Iran would be solely defensive in nature. It most certainly would not be, and Zionist Lee Bollinger personalized this aggressive desire and tendency toward committing mass murder by a government (the US) much more than Ahmadinejad.

Our country’s ‘leaders’ over and over are demonstrating themselves to be a bunch of power hungry, violent and even genocidal group of thugs. Lee Bollinger is case in point. He was pushing for the US to start a war with Iran but we should resist the call. And if Bollinger wants to champion ‘free speech’ then he should take his carnival to the Occupied Territories and champion tearing down The Wall. Israel would take his ‘free speech’ and shove it back down his throat for sure.

The think tank pretend thinkers

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Eric Verlo

Tim Robbins made a recent quip on Bill Maher, suggesting maybe “-if you fuck things up so badly, you can no longer be considered an expert.” I thought I’d call out the right-wing so-called experts, the traitorous anti-democratic unpatriotic lying think tank “scholars” for what they are: immoral and indefensible, opportunistic criminals, who by their damning credentials should be banned from public discourse until after long stints in prison.

THE INTELLECTUALLY-DISHONEST:
Heritage Foundation, (latest misdeed Africa)
Hudson Institute
Hoover Institute, (welcomes Rumsfeld)
Manhattan Institute, (welcomes Judith Miller)
Heartland Institute
Cato Institute
Rand Corporation
Brookings Institution
Progressive Policy Institute
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

THE ANTI-INTELLECTUALS:
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
Center for Security Policy (CSP)
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
American Jewish Committee (AJC)
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
Council on Foreign Relations
Conservative Federalist Society
National Bureau of Economic Research
Center for the Study of American Business
Institute for International Economics
Competitive Enterprise Institute
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Progress and Freedom Foundation
National Center for Policy Analysis
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Capital Research Center
Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
State Policy Network
Center for Strategic and International Studies
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
(more)

IN DISGUISE:
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Reason Foundation
Freedom Forum
Coalition for a Democratic Majority
Committee on the Present Danger
Committee for the Free World
Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC)
Foundation for Cultural Review
American Studies Center
Accuracy in Media
Center for Media and Public Affairs
Center for Science, Technology and Media
Media Research Center
Media Institute
Media Integrity Project
Institute for Justice (IJ)
Center for Individual Rights
Washington Legal Foundation
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD)
Institute on Religion and Public Life
Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
(more)

IN PRINT:
The New Republic
Commentary (AJC)
National Review
The Public Interest
The National Interest
Weekly Standard
The New Criterion
The American Spectator
Public Opinion [not Public Opinion Quarterly] (AEI)
National Affairs
Washington Quarterly
Defense News
World Net Daily
“Radio America”
“Alan Keyes Show”
“Dateline Washington”
“Firing Line”
“Think Tank”
“Peggy Noonan on Values”
Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
New York Post

FUNDED BY:
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Carthage Foundation
Earhart Foundation
Charles G. Koch Foundation
David H. Koch Foundation
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
Phillip M. McKenna Foundation
JM Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation
Henry Salvatori Foundation
Sarah Scaife Foundation
Smith Richardson Foundation
Adolph Coors Foundation

I might as well mention the good guys, lest they get caught up with the similarly named miscreants. But why not stick to the experts in the Universities? Certainly higher education has become corrupted, but it should be easier to police, through peer review, than corporate funded experts who just hang up any old shingle and make appearances as scholars on the corporate funded media. For what it’s worth, the
ACTUAL PROGRESSIVES:
Economic Policy Institute
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Institute for Policy Studies
Worldwatch Institute
Center for Defense Information
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

Generals among the cherry trees

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Eric Verlo

Military brass speaking truthfully
The Washington Post, uncredited for being a chief jingoist newspaper behind Bush’s war making, weighed in on the General Petraeus Westmoreland testimony, indignant that of all things, the general’s credibility should be questioned.

General Petraeus had an exemplary record apparently, commanding the 101st Airborne. That division may still have cache in recollections of D-Day, but I remember those guys in the news in Iraq. In Fallujah, before we leveled it, the 101st initiated a gunfight with unarmed schoolboys who were protesting the requisition of their school for an American encampment. That was back in the days when individual atrocities, if they got past the media censors, seemed to draw outrage. Before Iraq became one single atrocity too dangerous for reporters to visit, a hand-basket already delivered which General Petraeus will testify, beyond reproach, is still well in hand.

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